When Donald Trump announced the killing of three men in a Venezuelan boat, he did not call them sailors, smugglers, or even drug traffickers. He called them “narco-terrorists,” and he boasted of ordering a “second kinetic strike.” The phrase fell from his Truth Social post like a bad spell. Three human beings were turned into a category. Their deaths were turned into a procedure. Neither word (narco-terrorist nor kinetic strike) has any stable legal meaning, but both serve the same purpose: to erase the people involved and to sanctify the violence done to them.
“Kinetic strike” is Pentagon jargon. Kinetic means physical, destructive force (missiles, bombs, bullets) as opposed to “non-kinetic” tools like cyber operations or sanctions. But the technical gloss conceals more than it reveals. “Kinetic strike” sounds clean, scientific, even hygienic compared to the truth: three men in a skiff were blown apart by American firepower in international waters. The phrase does to language what the Hellfire does to flesh: it obliterates.
“The phrase does to language what the Hellfire does to flesh: it obliterates.”
Paired with “narco-terrorist,” it creates a closed circuit of justification. The men are first defined out of humanity by a label with no legal anchor; then their destruction is described in language that removes blood and smoke. A fisherman becomes a narco-terrorist. A missile becomes a kinetic strike. Sovereignty is exercised without ever admitting that anonymous people were killed at the president’s command.
“A fisherman becomes a narco-terrorist. A missile becomes a kinetic strike. Sovereignty is exercised without ever admitting that anonymous people were killed at the president’s command.”
A Category Without Law
What is a narco-terrorist? The term first appeared in Latin America in the 1980s. Peruvian officials used it to describe Shining Path guerrillas who used drug profits to fund insurgency. In Colombia, it was applied to Escobar’s Medellín cartel when it unleashed car bombs and assassinations against judges, journalists and politicians. At least in those contexts, the phrase had some descriptive purchase: traffickers acting like terrorists, or terrorists using drug profits to wage war.
But in U.S. law there is no such settled category. Terrorism is defined, albeit loosely, in statute. Drug trafficking is criminalised in detail. But “narco-terrorism” is not codified. It floats, unmoored, available for rhetorical deployment. It can mean cartel hitmen, guerrilla fundraisers, or (as now) three anonymous men in a small boat in international waters. Vagueness is the point. If the president can declare someone a narco-terrorist, he need not show evidence. The label itself supplies the conviction.
In theory, U.S. law still restrains executive violence. Congress must authorise wars. The Posse Comitatus Act restricts the military from acting as police. Due process protects even the accused criminal. But the merging of drugs and terror erodes these limits. A trafficker is a criminal; a terrorist is an enemy combatant. Fuse the two and the president can treat ordinary crime as an act of war. Arrest becomes unnecessary. Trial becomes impossible. Missile strikes take the place of subpoenas.
This is why Trump delights in the term. It allows him to claim that by killing three nameless men, he has defended the homeland. It allows him to sidestep Congress, to invoke “self-defence” against a fishing skiff, to present murder as strategy. The “narco-terrorist” is an instrument of sovereign power: created by language, destroyed by force.
The Politics of Erasure
Every imperial project requires figures of erasure, categories into which unwanted populations can be dumped. The “bandit” of colonial India, the “Communist” of Cold War Latin America, the “terrorist” of post-9/11 Afghanistan. The narco-terrorist joins this roll-call. He is dangerous, anonymous, irredeemable. He appears in the president’s rhetoric only to vanish beneath American firepower.
The politics are obvious. By designating Venezuelan smugglers as terrorists, Trump ties his violence against Nicolás Maduro’s government to the broader war on terror. Venezuela ceases to be simply a hostile state in Washington’s hemisphere; it becomes a nest of global threat, a staging ground for enemies who “kill millions of Americans” with their poison. The fiction is ludicrous. Opioid deaths in Ohio have more to do with Purdue Pharma and a broken healthcare system than with cocaine shipments from Caracas—but the fiction serves its purpose. It makes foreign policy spectacle.
The “narco-terrorist” is not aimed at Venezuela so much as at Florida. Cuban and Venezuelan exile communities have long been a fulcrum of Republican politics. To appear strong against Maduro, to announce kills in the Caribbean, is to project toughness where it counts electorally. Bodies in the water become campaign material. Trump posts the strike video on Truth Social; his followers cheer the spectacle of sovereignty.
The Continuity of Empire
Trump’s innovation is not in killing. It is in naming. The United States has always manufactured categories to legitimise violence. At Wounded Knee in 1890, the “hostile Indian.” In Vietnam, the “Viet Cong sympathiser.” In Iraq, the “military-aged male.” Now, in the Caribbean, the “narco-terrorist.” Each term does the same work: it renders the person killable, their rights null, their humanity void.
Each era produces its own scandal. Vietnam’s body counts were revealed as lies. Colombia’s “false positives” produced outrage when the truth emerged. Obama’s drone programme was condemned for killing more civilians than militants. Trump’s narco-terrorists will one day be exposed as men whose identities were unknown, whose guilt was asserted after the fact, whose lives were extinguished for propaganda. The pattern is clear: empire requires enemies, and when none are available, it invents them.
“Body count, false positive, signature strike, kinetic strike—each reduces human beings to metrics or procedures.”
What Is at Stake
It would be easy to treat Trump’s rhetoric as buffoonish overreach, another example of his carnival politics. But the stakes are high. To call someone a narco-terrorist is to grant the state extraordinary powers. It is to justify killing without war, without trial, without law. It is to make sovereignty synonymous with death.
Categories travel. Today Venezuelan smugglers, tomorrow Mexican cartels, next week Haitian migrants. Once the category exists, it will be applied wherever convenient. Already, Republicans in Congress talk of designating all cartels as terrorist groups, a move that would permit strikes inside Mexico. Already, ICE and the Border Patrol invoke “cartel terror” to justify militarised raids in U.S. cities. The word seeps outward, contaminating every debate on drugs, migration, and security.
What Trump has demonstrated is not strength but weakness. The United States cannot win the drug war, cannot win the terror war, cannot suppress the structural crises eating its own society. So it collapses the two into a single enemy, a phantom it can kill at will. The narco-terrorist is less a real figure than a symptom: the symptom of a state that can only govern through violence, that can only project sovereignty by annihilating the anonymous.
“To resist Trump’s violence means resisting the language that makes it possible.”
Naming as Violence
It matters what we call people. “Narco-terrorist” is not description but execution. The moment the word is spoken, the law is suspended, the missile armed. Trump is merely more brazen than his predecessors, broadcasting the spectacle of sovereign violence rather than hiding it in footnotes and memos. But the logic is the same.
The narco-terrorist joins a long line of imperial phantoms. He is useful precisely because he is undefined. He is the cipher into which the anxieties of empire are poured, the silhouette against which the president poses as protector. He has no name, no trial, no story. He exists only as a target, already guilty, already dead.
That is why we must resist the word itself. To accept it is to accept the erasure, to consent to the execution. The narco-terrorist is a fiction, but a fiction with blood on its hands. It is how empire sustains itself in decline: by killing categories, and counting corpses as policy.
